Blizzard is taking their other titles to your mobile

At the dawn of mobile games, Blizzard has rightfully taken notice of the growing community, its players and fans. Besides releasing a mobile title for the Diablo franchise, Diablo Immortal, Blizzard is eyeing many of their other titles to go mobile. Allen Adham, an executive producer at Blizzard, has hinted at more of their titles joining games on mobile saying:

“In terms of Blizzard’s approach to mobile gaming, many of us over the last few years have shifted from playing primarily desktop to playing many hours on mobile, and we have many of our best developers now working on new mobile titles across all of our IPs.”

It looks like Blizzard is making their games accessible on mobile phones and they’re not about to stop with Diablo Immortal. As of now, there are many games being developed internally and Blizzard is keeping their lips sealed until they are perfectly optimized for all our mobile devices.

Blizzard has four main franchises: Diablo, Overwatch, Starcraft, and Warcraft. There’s no reason for them to stop since they soared in success with the free-to-play strategy card game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which was initially released on PC and then mobile.

Despite mixed and polarizing reviews on their recently announced Diablo Immortal, Blizzard has taken notice of the growing mobile gaming community and is undoubtedly catering to it. It looks like Blizzard will have their hands full working on potentially porting all their titles to mobile and creating brand new titles catering to mobile gamers.

Playdate is a handheld gaming system with a crank

If you’re bored of the current gaming console landscape or are simply waiting for the next-gen PlayStation to come out, there’s this new handheld system that might keep you a little busy.

From a company named Panic, which is known for developing the popular game Firewatch, comes the Playdate. It may seem like a simple gaming system at first, but look to its right and you’ll see its defining feature: a crank.

The developer says that some titles will use this analog controller exclusively, while some won’t at all (which, to me, sorta defeats the purpose of placing that game on this console). Everything will be played on its monochrome screen with no backlighting.

You can see it in action here:

Oh yeah, the crank! No, it doesn’t power the device. It’s a flip-out rotational controller that puts a fresh spin on fun. Some games use it exclusively, some use it with the d-pad, and some not at all. pic.twitter.com/XYW97nLZKK

The spin here is that the Playdate will come with a subscription of 12 games — delivered to you once a week for 12 weeks. It’s part of the initial cost of US$ 149, but there’s no word yet if there’ll be subscriptions after that and how much they’ll cost.

Each game will be a surprise, which may or not be a good thing. Spending this much on an unproven console — and possibly more for succeeding subscriptions — could end up becoming a costly risk.

Orders will be accepted later this year, while actual shipping will happen in early 2020. For now, you can sign up through the official website to receive updates on its progress.

Here’s an early look at the Sony PS5’s raw performance

Even though Sony dished out some early info on the upcoming PlayStation 5 (should they choose to stick to the numbered naming scheme) and revealed that it’s more than just a mere upgrade, we don’t have any tangible data on what exactly to expect.

Fortunately, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Takashi Mochizuki was present at Sony’s most recent gaming presentation and had this video to show us:

What you see here is a comparison between the loading times of the PS5 and PS4 Pro. Make no mistake here: The next-generation console is incredibly fast! A lot of credit must be given to the built-in SSD the PS5 will ship with.

This should be taken with a grain of salt, however. Tech demos are often fixed to make the newer (and more expensive) product seem superior. To the next-gen console’s credit, it’ll come with the latest eight-core Ryzen chip and a custom GPU from AMD’s Radeon Navi, which are capable of 8K gaming and ray tracing when put together.

Sadly, we still don’t have a release date and Sony won’t announce anything at E3 next month. For now, savor your PS4 and its growing library of classics.